What’s the hold up?

For everyone that has been waiting a veritable age for all of the awesome new Mystcraft features to be released I wanted to give a general update.

There are a few minor things I need to do to Mystcraft before the release. This particular arc had a lot of major changes, and I didn’t want to release it with too many holes. It’s still going to have a few on release despite that, but it should be functional.
A known issue with the upcoming release is the generation of additional properties of ages. I have a really awesome system worked out that will make it so ages get properties you didn’t expect or write (and only rarely add things you didn’t want), but at present it only adds things it needed. This means things like tendrils won’t appear in an age unless you write them in. Some people will like this for the time being, but it isn’t how it is supposed to work.
Another issue is the rarity system needing to be adjusted. Currently, symbols have a single rarity value when they should really have one for how often they spawn as treasure, how often they can be purchased as villager trades, and how often they can be generated into books. At present this rarity value affects all of those. This is not as critical an issue at least.

The issue that is actually holding up release is you can’t actually play Mystcraft legitimately. The collection of pages is just too difficult. Whereas previously you could get all of the symbols eventually via spamming books and instead spawned in a notebook to spare your harddrive, currently you have to spawn pages through creative just to ever get to writing. Villagers trade the pages, and all (non-creative) symbols are available that way, but my villagers are apparently quite rare, homeless, and also broken. Pages as treasure only occurs in ages and only in a specific structure. There are simply not enough sources of pages yet. Once that issue is resolved you shall have a release. 🙂

There are a few other issues as well, but that’s the only one that will take any real time. I don’t know how long it will take to get that sorted out, though. Here’s hoping it’s soon. I really want to see what all you can create.

I absolutely love Mystcraft. I commend you on your work in making this mod. I am curious if you have though about adding in a new tree type and making a recipe with its wood to make the paper used for descriptive and linking books? Also possibly involving ink in the writing process (possibly new ink harvested from a new animal type, the beetle) just to make it closer to the Myst cannon. I know that is probably a lot of work, but the closer it is to the storyline the more enjoyment I get out of it.

Perhaps pages is the wrong way to go about it as far as drops go. Think about it in real world terms, how often do you go into a store and find a single page for sale? How often when you are looking through an old box of your things is it just one page as opposed to a whole book? What if instead of buying pages or finding pages you find a “D’ni Tome” which acts as a storage item for pages in the same way a notebook does (I think).

You might even have different categories of books (eventually) that have different categories of words. For example, a D’ni storybook might have only basic symbols and few of them, such as directions, water, some of the basic biomes, maybe monsters or animals if those will be symbols now, sun, moon, etc. You could then have D’ni research notes that might have only a few pages but higher chance of a rare symbol. A D’ni encyclopedia volume could have a lot of symbols selected more randomly. That kind of thing.

Hmm, I like this idea. As long as the player can find the first “primer” book he can then build and explore from there. Almost takes on a “Magic: The Gathering” feel. Begin with a starter and find booster packs as you go.

Could even just make the spawns in the overworld have a few sets of symbols needed to make some basic ages then hide more advanced pages within those worlds to build out from there. Gives the whole thing more of an exploration feel which I definitely like.

I just had a thought. What if you could somehow analyze or guess the symbols in random books and learn them that way? With some sort of resource cost maybe, and/or bad stuff happening if you do it wrong.

I imagine this only working while you’re inside the age in question too. So you make a random book, travel through it and explore to try and figure out the symbols.

I kind of liked the pages in the item frames when you first introduced them a while ago. I thought it would be cool if these were found on walls in the dungeons, strongholds, or caves, even, and it would be a nice little bonus to get an extra frame.

Thank you for the blog update! If you’re still looking for ideas how to get some pages more easily, how about being able to craft a page for the biome you’re currently in. That would support the exploration of your overworld, to get more biomes you already have. For the dungeon generation maybe a system like ee3, where you can right-click a spawner to fill the damage bar of a page and once its full, you’ll get the dungeon-gen page for future use.

Interesting ideas for how to make pages based on exploration. I like this path as it encourages that. I want to stick to the idea of players discovering The Art, and not creating it, but perhaps this can be related to the research system. 🙂

When I first read this I thought “that’s weird”, but then I thought about it and now think it’s brilliant! It feels Mysty. I like the idea of traveling the world, studying it and then translating it into new ways of creating ages. Gives the “Atrus taking notes” feel to the whole process.

I really like the idea.
But i think there should be a process of infusing the Aspect into your page.
like an Infusion Altar you need to build in the specific biome and then you have to sacrifice biome specific items/animals like a kitty + jungle sapling + cocoa + vines for a jungle.
What do you think?

hey xcomp how about you make the pages into sort of artefacts which you can dig up when randomly digging dirt in an area marked by a simple structure. maybe the page can spawn with the dirt block as if it was inside it probably hard to code but its an idea nonetheless….

Hi Xcomp, The good work! I have one request and forgive me if it’s implemented somewhere and I haven’t noticed it. I have a problem with users, creating a ton of different ages And it consumes hard drive space and resources on my servers RAMdisk. . Could you include some sort of age cleanup procedure? For instance, if you burn a descriptive book and lava that age gets deleted?

What you describe (or similar things) have been previous stated to be planned changes.

What will -really- stop your users from making massive quantities of worlds however are the upcoming changes, in which making a junk world gains you very little. Give your users a single sacrificial mining age and I suspect a -lot- of the other issues will sort themselves out.

By making us search for the pages, the amount of ages a person will “”require is going to go down a good bit. I haven’t spent an overtly long time on servers with Mystcraft enabled but from what I did see they had many problems with people who made ages like it was no big deal but with no malicious intentions. Sometimes there were thought to be issues with people using excessive ages as a form of grief though I don’t know of any actual cases of that happening. I have some thoughts and I don’t know if they have been stated but if so please just ignore them.
If there isn’t already a way to moderate how many ages a person can have, now that we are searching for ages rather than making ages to learn them, limiting a player to a few ages is something that’s possible while still allowing them the coolest feature of Mystcraft which is age creation imo. A quick way to easily delete ages in game would be cool if its not already planned or isn’t impossible. Although I’m pretty sure you can go into save files and somewhere else to manually delete all the saved data from ages…I just think each player also having the ability to destroy all saved data attached to a specific age in world would be really cool. Responsible players could then delete unused ages to help with the servers space and the admin or owner would still be able to manually delete ages suspected of abandonment. I really hope I’m not one of those noobs to the forum who restate faq’s to the point of agitation.
Anyway I love this mod and would wait years for the “final” product! Thank you XCompWiz!

I really really like this idea. I’m a server admin on a FTB MindCrack style server and we’re really struggling with having Mystcraft available. We’re a small server, with a fairly weak host, we get seriously bogged down when someone starts exploring ages and such. I still haven’t really explored that aspect of the mod, I just really enjoy being able to make Linkbook Hubs for my multiple areas. I’m just having a hard time figuring out how we can work around the endless Ages problem. I think I’ve been on another server that actually has Ages disabled, or at least the creation of Ages, they had a few Ages made with a linkbook hub leading to them, but other players couldn’t create them. I just have no idea how they pulled that off and I believe the server admins work on customized plugins for Minecraft, so they might have actually altered something in the code of Mystcraft. I’m not all that technically literate as far as that goes. Any help or suggestions would be awesome, but yeah, coming from a server admin the ability to limit the amount of ages created per player, or overall, would be an incredible change. As it is, if we acccepted more whitelist applicants we would probably have to disable Mystcraft, and I really don’t want to do that! 😀

Also, when Mindcrack upgraded from v7 to v8.01 I seemed to have lost all my Mystcraft data, all the linkbooks disappeared. I didn’t manage to update myself though, the server owner did, is there a way to keep that data?

Are the current ages compatible with the future systems? Will ages I currently use still be fully usable, or do they need to be deleted and recreated?
I am currently thinking about adding Mystcraft to the FTB-MindCrack Pack and giving each player his own home age. The outcry of rage if these ages would need to be scrapped on an update, could probably be heard miles away 😉

Across the Ages themselves, I’m sure. 😉 Yes, the ages will be compatible with future versions. I haven’t broken a save yet (though my generation hasn’t always lined up between versions), and my age data loader handles the original format still, though I’m not sure how well… 😉

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